One of our young inventors grew up in a small town in rural South Carolina; another came from Bangladesh; and a third got hooked on computers at age seven in Haifa, Israel. What these three have in common is their youthful optimism and their dedication to one of IBM’s core values: innovation that matters for our company and the world.

This is no empty slogan: Today, IBM announced that it received a record 7,534 US patents in 2014, marking the 22nd consecutive year that the company topped the list of US patent recipients. Amazingly, on average, we receive more than one new US patent for every hour of every work day.

Hidden behind the raw statistics is an exciting insight: IBM’s young scientists, software programmers and engineers are making important contributions to the company’s innovation achievements. (Thoughts? Tweet to #patent, #invent.)
Across the company and across the globe, they’re advancing the state of the art in the technology areas that we believe will be critical for progress in businesses, government, individual empowerment and society as a whole. The technology areas we focus on go by the acronym CAMSS–for Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security. IBM is staking out leadership positions in each of them. And our young inventors play essential roles in fulfilling the company’s ambitions.

Here are mini-profiles of five of our outstanding young inventors–one for each of the CAMSS.

Stacy HobsonAge: 35Patents: 11Location: IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, New York, USAPersonal history: Grew up in small town in rural South Carolina. Mom, a teacher; dad, U.S. Military. PhD in neuroscience and cognitive science from University of Maryland.Shared patent: #8,635,673. For enabling or restricting access to information to particular individuals via MOBILE applications.Scenario: Your bank offers you access to your credit rating real time as long as you retain a balance of more than $5,000 in your savings account. Data to access and the mobile app interface change dynamically based on your status.Potential impact: Could become a core function of many mobile apps for consumers and enterprises.What inspires her as an inventor:“I like to create knowledge that will provide value for people and will last a long time. Also, it’s a great conversation-starter at parties.”Video selfie

Marco NettoAge: 34Patents: 7Location: IBM Research, Sao Paulo, BrazilPersonal history: Grew up in Caxias do Sul, in southern Brazil. Mom, a lawyer; dad, a civil engineer. Had never touched a computer when he selected computer science as his major. PhD in computer science from University of Melbourne, Australia.Shared patent: #8,635,294. This smarter-cities technology sends alerts and shares data among separate organizations via CLOUD computing.Scenario: Three cities on a frequently-flooding river share information so the downstream cities can prepare better for storms coming their way.Potential impact: Given early warning, emergency managers can run simulations and prepare more effectively for dealing with flooding of streets, homes and businesses–saving lives and property.What inspires him as an inventor:“I like coming up with ideas that nobody has thought of before. I’m never satisfied. I always try to improve my inventions.”Video selfie

Jalal MahmudAge: 35Location: Watson Group, San Jose, Calif.Patents: 13Personal history: Grew up in Chittagong, the port city of Bangladesh. Dad was in ocean shipping, barge building and the garment industry; mom, a housewife. Dad’s businesses had ups and downs, and Jalal turned toward science–inspired by an uncle who was an engineer. Got his PhD in computer science from SUNY-Stonybrook.Shared patent: #8,639,559. ANALYTICS software gathers and analyzes clicks on Web shopping search results.Scenario: A department store chain offers customers incentives for installing click-tracking software on their browsers. The software records how the participants react when they see search results comparing the chain’s merchandise with that of competitors. Marketers adjust headlines and other messaging based on the analysis.Potential impact: Retailers and merchandise brands sharpen their marketing tactics; consumers find the products they really want quicker and easier.What inspires him as an inventor:“I like to solve real-world problems with novel approaches–impacting IBM’s business as well as the world.”Video selfie

Aaron K. BaughmanAge: 35Patents: 21Location: IBM Strategic Outsourcing, Silver Springs, Md., USAPersonal history: Moved around the eastern US as a kid–a “force multiplier” for learning through experiences. Mom, an IT executive; dad, a hospice chaplain. Got his M.S. in computer science from The Johns Hopkins University.Shared patent: #8,856,061. For gathering and interpreting SOCIAL signals in entertainment venues.Scenario: In an amusement park, sensor data is gathered to track individual’s enjoyment of rides and experiences. The data is analyzed to help people plan their paths through the venues.Potential impact: Could be used to help people improve their experiences as tourists, in shopping malls, and at sporting events–in addition to amusement parks.What inspires him as an inventor:“I love to learn. The invention process is prefect for that. I research to discover what is already known and done. Then I study and come up with a better way to do it.”Video selfie

Roee HayAge: 29Patents: 10Location: IBM Software Lab, Herzliyah, IsraelPersonal history: Grew up in Haifa. Dad, a real estate investor. Mom, an artist, raised four boys. First computer at age 7. First programming at 10. Did some hacking; none malicious. B.S. in computer science from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.Shared patent: #8,806,133. For SECURITY against cache poisoning exploits.Scenario: Malicious hackers use software vulnerabilities in the Windows PC operating system to steal sensitive data and fool individuals into performing transactions on phony Web sites. On shared computers, all users become vulnerable. The invention walls off users’ activities from each other.Potential impact: Limits the impact of attacks on shared systems.What inspires him as an inventor:“My team thinks like hackers. We spot vulnerabilities in systems and figure out how to exploit them. Then we invent defenses against those exploits. We’re making computer software safer.”Video selfie

One of the watershed moments in the history of computing took place on Dec. 9, 1968. Douglas Engelbart and his team at Stanford Research Institute presented a technology demonstration that included the first public showings of the computer mouse, hypertext, dynamic file linking and shared-screen collaboration over a network. Those advances turned out to be essential building blocks for personal computing and Internet, and the event came to be called “The Mother of All Demos.”

While only history will say for sure, I think we saw the glimmer of a similar new beginning last week at IBM Research – Almaden, in Silicon Valley. The IBM Cognitive Systems Colloquium signaled a shift from a singular focus on the von Neumann computing architecture, which has dominated computer science and the computer industry since the mid-1940s, to new architectures modeled on the human brain.

To be clear, I’m talking about systems that augment human capabilities–not machines that do our thinking for us. Also, let me make it clear that while von Neumann-style computing faces major challenges, I don’t expect it to disappear. There are plenty of things it’s really good at.

The event brought together leading thinkers on brain-inspired computing from industry, government, philanthropy, and academia–including authorities in computer science and neuroscience. If this were a wedding, guests representing those two sciences would be sitting on the opposite sides of the aisle.

The audience was just as impressive. Nearly 300 people from over 70 organizations attended, drawn, it seemed, by a sense that something important was happening that they didn’t want to miss out on. They included Turing Award winner Ivan Sutherland, the Neurosciences Institute’s Einer Gall, Jeff Krichmar of the Cognitive Robotics Laboratory at UC Irvine, and Jeff Hawkins, the mobile computing pioneer who now heads up AI startup Numenta. In addition to Dharmendra Modha, four other IBM Fellows were in the audience: Hamid Pirahesh, Stuart Parkin, Ron Fagin and Chandrasekaran Mohan.

While the names were eye catching, the content of the presentations more than lived up to expectations. Our presenters demonstrated nothing less than the state of the art in brain-inspired computing. In addition, I believe, the discussions during the breaks allowed people to make personal connections that will bear fruit for years to come. For a more detailed look at the program, visit a blog post that captured the event in real time.

We focused part of the program on IBM’s SyNAPSE Project, which was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. The IBM team has produced a chip modeled on the human brain, TrueNorth, with 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses that only consumes 70 milliwatts of power. The chip could run non-stop for a week on an iPhone battery. We’re in the process of building an ecosystem to help take the SyNAPSE technology from science project to products and services in the marketplace–and we’re looking for partners in industry, academia and the startup community.

The chip is designed to augment the human senses. Think robots, self-parking cars, sensor networks on gas pipelines and wind farms, and public safety monitoring applications. And think about your smartphone being used as an always-on mobile sensing device for contextual computing.

This chip and the software tools and libraries they created to support it represent a major advance in the field of non-Von Neumann computing. That means the technology is not based on the architecture laid out in 1945 by American mathematician John Von Neumann, which became the core architecture for most computer systems built since then.

In the Von Neumann architecture, data is routed back and forth repeatedly between the logic, memory and communications elements of computing systems. That linear approach requires a lot of data movement, which consumes a lot of time and energy. Our TrueNorth chip interweaves logic (neurons), memory (synapses), and communications (axons), eliminating what’s known as the Von Neumann Bottleneck. TrueNorth embodies a parallel, distributed, modular, scalable, fault-tolerant, and event-driven architecture.

At last week’s colloquium, Horst Simon, Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spoke about his hopes for the new brain-inspired computing architectures, saying, “We need technologies like TrueNorth to take us into the future.”

At IBM, we certainly hope that TrueNorth and the work of our SyNAPSE team provides a pathway to the future of computing. But we recognize–and welcome–the fact that there will be many experiments tried, and, potentially, multiple paths forward as we move beyond the single-minded focus on Von Neumann computing.

What I’m certain of is this: brain-inspired computing will become an ever-more-important factor in computer science, science, technology, industry, government, and society–and, as a result, we’ll be able to achieve things in collaboration with computers that we never would have thought possible before.

It’s hard to believe it’s only been 10 short months since the IBM Watson Group was announced. We talked of bringing together a unique group of people – incredibly talented professionals from across IBM – into a new unit.

This included the single largest movement of IBM Research personnel in our history, along with 10 – 12 startups worth of new cognitive technologies that would help define the Watson team. Individuals and core capabilities from our software business would join into the fray.

A new approach to engaging the market would be created from talent across IBM’s sales, marketing, services and consulting organizations. A new cloud delivery organization would be formed out of our services teams to serve this market – all brought together with a single purpose: to usher in a new era of computing.

Ten months later, we marvel at the progress that has been made. Beyond the beginning of Project Lucy in Africa, clients in South Africa have now joined our cause. Organizations across Australia, New Zealand and Thailand have jumped onboard Watson with both feet.

Across industries, significant progress has been made. In healthcare, key societal challenges are being tackled with organizations like Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, the New York Genome Center and the Mayo Clinic. We continue to expand our work in educating doctors with Cleveland Clinic. Watson Ecosystem partners like Welltok, GenieMD, Modernizing Medicine and Pathway Genomics are pushing the possibilities of cognitive computing further into the healthcare market. Every week we engage new partners and clients around tackling new diseases and healthcare issues.

In financial services, industry leaders like USAA and ANZ Bank are in production, running Watson solutions today. Publically announced projects with clients like the Development Bank of Singapore are making tremendous progress. Just this week we announced that we would be kicking off new initiatives with Caixa Bank in Spain and Bumrungrad in Thailand.

The first wave of Powered by Watson apps has been launched by our Ecosystem Partners, taking Watson into retail, travel, security, non-profit, healthcare, veterinarian medicine, and more. Established global partners, like Genesys, are advancing the use of cognitive capabilities in the call center. New services and products are opening up ways in which the market will see and experience a new era of computing. Watson Analytics, now in market, will help people understand data in new ways and even help them predict what might happen next.

IBM Watson’s future has a new home on the edge of the East Village in NYC, in a place now known as Silicon Alley, one of the most vibrant, exciting areas for technology innovation in the world today.

As part of opening our new headquarters at 51 Astor Place, we’ve created the Client Experience Center, an industry-centric, immersive experience that showcases our technology in an innovative new way.

The CEC represents a new model to engage our clients who are ready to start a cognitive journey, and will enable them to work alongside business and technical subject matter experts to understand the full promise of Watson, firming up their Watson use case, and establishing the foundation for a collaborative and successful partnership.

But Watson isn’t only staying in NYC, Watson is ready to take on the world. Today in our labs, projects are underway to teach Watson Spanish. More will follow as Watson learns to understand the nuances of language and culture within these initial projects, partnering with our clients. We’ll match our global development efforts with the establishment of worldwide Watson Client Engagement Centers, starting with New York City, Dublin, Melbourne, Singapore, London and San Paolo.

As part of our outreach, we are expanding the Watson Ecosystem to a larger audience, providing easier access to Watson technology via Bluemix. Pre-trained content in areas such as general knowledge, healthcare and financial services will help facilitate rapid prototype development. Cognitive skills affirmed via our certification program and Talent Hub will help build the future. We have grown our partnership program more than 30x over 10 short months, and can’t wait to see how it accelerates with our new offerings and global footprint.

As we expand our capabilities and reach new markets around the world we hope you’ll find the time to come visit us at our new home at 51 Astor Place. See you soon!
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When IBM’s original Watson computer competed and won on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!, it demonstrated to an audience of millions how a computer could understand the rules of a game and quickly retrieve facts from a vast storehouse of information.

That question-answering skill is a key element of what we call the era of cognitive computing. It is already beginning to impact whole domains of human endeavor, starting with the way physicians treat diseases. And it’s improving the productivity of business—by beginning to transform online shopping and customer service.

For the first time, the general public was exposed to another aspect of cognitive computing: the ability of machines to discover knowledge that was not known before and to collaborate with humans to create brand new things—in this case food recipes that were adventurous, surprising and tasty.

Michael Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson Group

Chef Watson is so much fun that it may seem trivial to some, but it demonstrates a powerful new force that’s being unleashed. Think of it as a discovery engine. And think of such engines as essential players in a new age of discovery.

Five centuries ago, intrepid sailors set off in tiny ships on journeys into the unknown, ushering in an explosion of geographic exploration that reshaped societies and planted the seeds for today’s global economy. Their travels were enabled by an essential tool for navigation—the sextant.

Today, enterprising individuals and organization are launching similar journeys. Scientists, engineers, researchers and analysts from a wide variety of fields are taping new technologies to explore another world–that of information. Watson’s discovery technologies are among those tools. The latest gene sequencing machines are another. There will be more.

IBM has combined concepts and technologies from a variety of research projects to create IBM Watson Discovery Advisor, an integrated package of technologies that’s delivered as a cloud service. The technology essentially makes a map of information by reasoning over patterns it “sees” in available data. It fills in the blanks on the data map. Or, to bust the metaphor, it connects the dots between pieces of related information. In this way, raw information is transformed into new knowledge.

At the same time, Watson Discovery Advisor will incorporate Watson question-answering capabilities, optimized for discovery. After people create new insights, they can engage in dialogues with the system to clarify their thinking and test propositions. The idea is that humans will collaborate with machines in new ways that deliver better results than people or computers could produce on their own.

This new capability has the potential to transform industries and professions. The low hanging fruit includes law, pharmaceuticals, biotech, education, chemicals, metals, scientific research, engineering, and criminal investigations. In fact, these technologies will be useful in research and analysis of any complex field where practitioners face the threat of becoming overwhelmed with data.

This isn’t pie-in-the-sky-thinking. We already have a number of clients testing the technology. One of them is using a Watson system that contains 40 million documents, ingests an average of 27,000 new documents per day, and provides insights for thousands of users.

Here are some scenarios for how discovery technologies can help change the game in industries and professions:

Pharmaceuticals: Drug development researchers can use the technologies to understand more deeply the biology of diseases. For example, Johnson & Johnson is teaching the computer to read and understand scientific papers that detail clinical trial outcomes—using that new knowledge to evaluate and develop medications. Down the line, this will help doctors match a drug with a patient, maximizing effectiveness and minimizing negative side effects.

While these initiatives are just beginning, Baylor College of Medicine, working with IBM Research scientists, has demonstrated that Watson can dramatically cut down on the time it takes to identify new drug candidates. In a matter of weeks, they spotted six proteins with the potential for modifying p53, a protein often associated with cancer. In contrast, using traditional methods, scientists have averaged only one such discovery per year.

Chemistry: Companies making chemicals or materials can use discovery technologies to understand the interactions of chemical compounds at the molecular level. That will help them to more quickly identify combinations of molecules that will produce the qualities they’re looking for, such as durability and flexibility.

Law: Law firms can use cognitive systems to ingest vast storehouses of statutes, journal articles and court rulings, allowing lawyers to search for useful precedents, information about judges, and novel strategies. Associates can use the systems as tutors to hone their skills in a particular legal domain.

You might notice that several of these industries and professions follow the apprenticeship model for developing talent. In addition to helping highly-skilled professionals discover new knowledge and invent new things, discovery technologies can help teach less experienced people—guiding them to best practices, answering their questions, and helping them develop the patterns and disciplines of thought that will be essential to success in their careers.

At the risk of being accused of being hyperbolic, I believe that these new discovery technologies have the potential of doing nothing less than free people’s minds. In our everyday lives, we’re bound by prejudices, habits of thought and the limits of our experience and knowledge. But what if we have a tool, an advisor, a mentor, that can help us break through those barriers and see the world and its possibilities in new ways? Cognitive computing can do that for us. In that way, it’s almost magical.

When I think about the future and the role of technology in shaping it, I believe progress will be made through the combined efforts of millions of innovators. So I’m issuing a challenge to everyone who shares my optimism about this new era of discovery and who wants to play a part.

Start each morning by asking yourself a simple question: “What will I discover today?”
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We have all faced frustrations when we’re trying to find just the right product or service, comparison shop or get something fixed or updated. We want personalized attention and quick and easy answers to our questions. A newly announced alliance of IBM and Genesys, a leading provider of customer experience and contact center solutions, aims to help companies serve their customers better. Here’s a scenario explaining how the services will work:

The U.S. has endured numerous economic eras — farming, machines, manufacturing, transportation, and so on. Why has the U.S. economy survived and, more importantly, thrived throughout these periods? Were we just inherently gifted farmers? Were we all mechanically inclined? Are we experts at efficiency? If not, what then?

Our economy has proven flexible enough to successfully transition from one era to the next, but how? The answer lies not in details about the eras themselves, but in the innovation that enabled and sustained them. That is, the U.S. has been a leading innovator in each economic era. We are curious. We are creative. We are inventive. And this innovative spirit has been the common thread throughout.

Another reason why our nation has successfully navigated numerous economic eras is we have the most robust patent system in the world. The patent system is an engine for innovation. Specifically designed to promote innovation, the patent system provides the protection needed to ensure creative endeavors are not misappropriated by others who have not shouldered the same development expense. To allow otherwise would advantage copycats over inventors.

The patent system also promotes follow-on innovation by disseminating information. Patents are published descriptions of how to make and use inventions. Inventors receive limited exclusive rights in exchange for teaching others about their inventions, thereby enabling others to further advance the technology without having to start “from scratch.” In a sense, each inventor helps the next inventor.

The patent system also attempts to strike a balance. Exclusive rights may reduce competition and raise prices in the short term, but increased innovation eventually enhances competition and benefits public well being. If patents are too strong or too weak the impact of the patent system is not optimized.

Recently, the patent system has come under attack. Some assailants seek so-called reforms to curb abuses – perhaps an attempt to find the optimally balanced “sweet spot” that benefits their interests. Debate is healthy and important, but the patent system is so complex that universal agreement as to the location of the sweet spot is unlikely. The optimal approach strikes a balance among stakeholders to promote innovation.

Unfortunately, thoughtful calls for patent reform have highlighted only negative aspects of the patent system. Emboldened by news of the negative aspects, extremists have called for outright abolishment of the entire patent system. Others have made declarations that legitimate and highly innovative technologies should not be patentable or should be treated with undue suspicion.

We risk more than merely missing the sweet spot. Innovation is our economy. We risk crippling our most innovative and competitive industries, such as life sciences and information technology. Imagine life without cures for new diseases or the next generation of computing – a new era of cognitive systems where machines can learn, reason and interact with people in more natural ways. We risk an economy without the jobs these industries provide.

That is why we support a healthy patent system. We need balance, not uncertainty. We need optimization, not destruction. And that is why IBM has joined and is backing the new Partnership for American Innovation, a cross-industry coalition of companies that is collaborating to promote a positive climate for technology innovation. For more information about this new group and its mission, see: www.partnershipforamericaninnovation.org.
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Pat Toole, IBM General Manager, System z, and University of Central Florida student Jovanna Marquez at IBM Enterprise 2013.

By Pat Toole

Jovanna Marquez was a Florida high school student who was contemplating a career in criminal justice when a teacher convinced her to take a computer science class and then introduced her to IBM’s Master the Mainframe Contest.

It changed her life. Ms. Marquez is now studying computer science at the University of Central Florida and credits Master the Mainframe with helping her develop technical chops and find her true career path. Call it “Millennials Meet the Mainframe.” Or, “zEnterprise for Generation Z.” It’s a story about how a new generation of students are finding great career opportunities working with the IBM mainframe, which continues to advance as one of the world’s most dynamic and vital computing platforms.

Pat Toole, General Manager, System z, IBM

What’s happening is that many organizations that already rely on the mainframe for its legendary transaction processing and data management might are moving more cloud, mobile and Big Data and analytics projects onto zEnterprise. The mainframe’s unique strengths — such as extreme scalability and rock-solid security — are proving as valuable as ever in the new era of computing. And more work for the mainframe means higher demand for mainframe skills and new opportunities for good jobs.

“We can power the next innovations,” Ms. Marquez says of her generation in this video. “I represent the new face of technology.”

Jovanna Marquez, Computer Science Major, UCF

Master the Mainframe allows college and high school students –more than 60,000 of them in 33 countries since 2005 –to gain mainframe experience, qualify for internships and get special access to job listings.The contest, part of IBM’s Academic Initiative, has been growing in popularity. In 2013, Master the Mainframe participation in the US and Canada grew 20 percent year over year. The 2013 contest in the US and Canada attracted more than 5,600 students — the largest turnout in North America since it began in 2005. Twenty-nine countries in the last year alone have become participants.

Given the contest’s global growth, the time has come to hold the first IBM Master the Mainframe World Championship. The first-ever Master the Mainframe world finals will take place April 6-8 in New York City.

We’re also announcing today that Kenya and South Africa will hold their first Master the Mainframe competitions in 2014. We’re especially happy to see Kenya and South Africa join because the mainframe has been experiencing new sales in emerging markets such as Africa, where governments and businesses in Cameroon, Namibia and Senegal have purchased mainframes the last couple of years.

Master the Mainframe serves as an introduction to coding and application development, and no experience with mainframes is necessary. In fact, the contest is designed for students with little or no mainframe experience, increasing with difficulty as the contest progresses.

The students get a unique introduction to the crucial role mainframes play in leading-edge technologies like cloud, Big Data and analytics, mobile and security.

And the world gets a new stream of talent to fill the important need for mainframe skills.

I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I love to shepherd businesses from concept to reality. Earlier in my career, I launched, built and sold two technology companies.

One of those companies was purchased by IBM, which launched the next phase of my career, when I became an intrepreneur. At IBM I was tapped to lead the team charged with turning Watson from a Jeopardy-playing experiment into a set of technology solutions capable of transforming industries. During our short three year effort, we’ve applied Watson to a variety of industry challenges, from health care to financial services and retail, and demonstrated the power of the new era of computing where cognitive systems think, improve by learning, and discover insights in massive amounts of data.

This startup within IBM took a major step forward in January, when IBM announced the creation of the IBM Watson Group, with a $1 billion investment, 2000 employees and its own headquarters in the heart of New York City’s Silicon Alley.

Now I’m ready for my next challenge —as an extrepreneur. I will be a managing director at the venture capital firm The Entrepreneur’s Fund (TEF) and will serve as an advisor to Michael Rhodin, the IBM senior vice president who is leading the IBM Watson Group. I see this as a chance to participate fully in the next phase of cognitive computing innovations.

I will be dedicating my time to seeding startups that will apply cognitive computing innovations, along with cloud and B2B technologies. This new role is a natural extension of the work I have been doing to create and expand a Watson ecosystem—championing entrepreneurs who are building a new class of cognitive apps powered by IBM’s Watson cloud platform.

I’ve often said that Watson, and other cognitive technologies that will follow, are the ‘desalination’ technique to unlocking an endless ocean of jumbled facts and numbers from Big Data into actionable insights. They have the potential to transform the IT industry and business the way the mainframe computer did 50 years ago.

For me, Watson has, and will continue to be, a personal quest as well as a professional avocation. My mother, who was a physician in her native India, was stricken with Alzheimer’s in recent years. At IBM, our first target for the Watson business was healthcare. We saw how Watson could help physicians understand their patients’ problems better and improve the personalization of treatments for them. I look at my mother and think of all of the people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and their families. I believe Watson can help solve the mysteries of this terrible disease and, ultimately, prevent or cure it.

We have already seen amazing progress of how Watson can be applied in health care, transforming how medicine is practiced, paid for and taught, through partnerships with organizations such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, WellPoint, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.

I foresee a nearly infinite array of ways cognitive technologies will help us in the future. They’ll transform organizations and industries—from healthcare and banking to transportation and retail services. And they’ll help individuals become more successful in their professional and private lives.

I’m excited about the future advances in cognitive computing coming from IBM, which will spur opportunities for a broad ecosystem — from start-ups to venture capitalists and large companies — that share a vision for creating a new class of cognitive apps that will transform how businesses and consumers make decisions.

There’s no shortage of ideas and interest in joining this community. Within months of IBM announcing its Watson Developer Cloud, more than 1,300 companies contacted IBM about participating in this innovation ecosystem.

I’m looking forward to working in partnership with my friends at IBM to work with these brilliant entrepreneurs and help their ideas succeed in the market.

In addition to my efforts, IBM’s Watson Group has set aside a fund of $100 million to back startups. My fund along with IBM made our first investments in Welltok, a Denver-based healthcare management company. It’s embedding Watson in its online service, CaféWell, which connects healthcare consumers with their care providers, employers and insurance companies—empowering people to take charge of their own well being.

As an entrepreneur, I learned through experience what it takes to make something out of nothing. As an intrepreneur, I helped grow something with incredible societal impact within IBM. Now, as an extrepreneur, I’m helping to light up an entire innovation ecosystem. Through a combination of investments, mentorship and strategic alliances I hope to help cognitive computing fulfill its potential to make the world work better.

Opportunities abound for successful and sustainable infrastructure projects. For example, designing an enduring vision, establishing an effective communication plan, and embracing data that will measure real value, are all things that can influence behavior and drive better decision making. But to do it right, businesses of all sizes must consider three key issues: resiliency, behavior and Big Data.

Resiliency is the ability for a system to recover, adapt, and grow in the face of unforeseen changes. Companies can use the concept of resilience to help grow or transform their business, including things like where to locate, where to source materials, or what energy systems to invest in that would optimize their adaptability to climate change.

While reducing the carbon footprint may be difficult for some businesses to justify on their balance sheets, from a resilience perspective we can see the systemic innovation such a carbon tax can produce. It dis-incentivizes GhG emissions and helps to ensure that the infrastructure of its individual business units don’t over-rely on carbon-intensive fuel to make money. This helps reduce exposure to potential supply shocks and, by enabling businesses to allocate funds to research and design for improving fuel efficiency, they can create a system that reinforces sustainability.

NYC’s resiliency plan, Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, addresses changes that need to be made to prepare for future catastrophic storms and other natural disasters. The innovation lies in the fact that it specifically targets the behavior of various agencies. This isn’t simply a list of prescriptions for better infrastructure; it is designed as a guiding governance document for all city agencies. Instead of ordering each department to produce its own plans for natural disaster, the city chose to create real resilience by facilitating collaboration and standardization of planning and action among city agencies and infrastructure.

Behavior is critical when rebuilding an infrastructure. Communication is often the bottleneck in climate adaptation – not a lack of technology advancement or financing. To be sure, there are strategies that can help steer behavior change. Ingersoll Rand, for example, created connections between the C-suite and operational managers that speed innovation and helps the company adapt to change. Such collaboration helps the company understand its tolerance to risk. But it also enables them to holistically plan sustainability initiatives and gain cooperation across departments.

For example, using a data-driven “triple bottom line” scorecard, AECOM has seen a complete transformation in how they assess infrastructural challenges, which has deeply impacted how communities make decisions. NYC has understood that providing consumers with utility pricing and information can play an important part in changing resource consumption behavior. As Big Data becomes more integrated into our decision making, cities and corporations can provide faster, more impactful and more accurate evaluations of different infrastructural proposals while limiting risk and unnecessary budgetary expenses.

By integrating resiliency into strategic decision-making, addressing behavioral change, and using Big Data to drive innovative solutions, the public and private sectors can craft better strategies for sustainable infrastructure projects. In turn, doors will open to help cities spur economic development, improve the health of their citizens, and speed their adaptation to a changing climate and world.
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Sander Dolder and Devin McIntire are recent graduates of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute Global Sustainable Enterprise, a joint masters program with the Ross School of Business and School of Environmental Science and Natural Resources. Both were part of the Erb-WEC Fellowship, sponsored by the Erb Institute and the World Environment Center and supported by IBM as part of its commitment to environmental sustainability and developing next-generation skills.

Sander Dolder is Senior Project Manger at the New York City Economic Development Corporation; follow him @sanderdolder and www.linkedin.com/in/sdolder/ ; Devin McIntire is a sustainability consultant specializing in organizational innovation and peer=to-peer markets; follow him @Devinmc and www.linkedin.com/pub/devin-mcintire/2/a28/4b4/
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When Thomas J. Watson Sr. joined IBM in 1914 as its president, the firm didn’t have a single engineer on its payroll, so he quickly hired engineers and set up a product development group in a brownstone near New York’s Penn Station. He created a patent development department in 1932 and, in 1945, he established the first corporate scientific research laboratory. Today, IBM Research has grown to become the largest corporate research organization in the world, with 3000 professionals at 12 labs in 10 countries.

The point is that the nature of innovation keeps evolving and organizations have to change with it.

That’s why IBM is adopting a new approach to innovation for our newly formed IBM Watson Group, which will be headquartered in New York’s Silicon Alley.In the group, we are melding research, product development, experience design and collaboration with business partners and clients—all with the goal of accelerating the development of cognitive computing solutions for many of the world’s most vexing problems. This new era of computing requires a new approach to innovation.

Our Watson initiative builds on top of IBM’s long tradition of innovation, which placed IBM as the No. 1 recipient of US patents in 2013 for the 21st year in a row. We received 6,809 patents, easily outdistancing Samsung, the No. 2 finisher, with 4,676. The next US company on the top 10 list, Microsoft, ranked No. 5.

Among our 2013 patents, we racked up 250 within the cutting-edge cognitive computing category. That brings to about 1,400 the number of active cognitive patents we own. The new patents ranged from machine learning and natural language processing to neuromorphic computing and computer vision. Here are a couple of them that stand out as being fundamental building blocks for the new era:

Confidence assessor: This one came out of our work to boost the abilities of the core Watson question-answering technology—which won on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! It’s a method for automatically estimating the confidence the system has in answers it has come up with to questions posed by humans. The invention will help experts make better decisions. (Patent No. US 8,510,296 B2)

Synaptic computing: Modeled on the workings of the mammalian brain, this invention lays the foundation of a digital approach to spiking neural circuits through a combination of hardware and software design. The invention is being used in a new kind of microchip architecture designed to give computers sensory capabilities—including vision and hearing. You can anticipate its use in sensor networks and robots. (Patent No. US 8,515,885 B2)

I expect the IBM Watson Group to produce its share of patents, but its approach to invention will be different. In forming the group, we’re taking a team of scientists from IBM Research and combining them with software developers. My hope is that the experimental culture of the researchers will rub off on the developers, and that the get-stuff-done mindset of the developers will be adopted by the researchers. Also, integrating the two groups will reduce the organizational friction that sometimes impedes the progress of technology into the marketplace.

Meanwhile, IBM Research will keep pushing ahead with more fundamental inquiries into a wide range of cognitive technologies and science.As they produce breakthroughs, we’ll shift them into IBM Watson Group for commercialization.

But there’s more to the mix in the Watson group than combining research with development. We believe that an essential element of the era of cognitive computing will be producing machines that interact with humans in ways that are more natural to us. To achieve that goal, we need to add experience design and to experiment with real-world problems and data. First-class design will produce first-class user experiences.

So in the IBM Watson Group, we bring together people with expertise in user interaction—including experience designers, Web site designers, app designers and marketers focused on the millennial demographic. They collaborate to create new uses for Watson-style technologies and new ways for computing systems to interact with people. Independent application developers and our clients will also participate in these skunk works projects. I believe that if you mash together people with a wide variety of skills and knowledge, and you give them freedom to think as they will, interesting things will happen.

I’ve been at IBM for 25 years, and I have toggled from research to development twice before. This is the first time I’ve combined the two in one organization. So this is a new world for me—as it is for many of my colleagues. Our challenge is clear: We have to invent a new way of innovating so we can transform business and society in the new era of computing.